Prediction: Social & Content Influence SEO
Over the years, effective search engine optimization (SEO) was all about knowing the tricks of the trade. The SEO of tomorrow will be less about having the right H1 tag or the right keywords on the page and more about creating really high quality, original content that is socially consumed and shared.
“For the past decade and a half, marketers have often thought of SEO, social media, and content as separate channels and segmented practices. But these barriers are crumbling. In the past 24 months, we’ve seen the overlap between search, social, and content increase at a rapid pace, spurred on by innovations from the search engines, and reinforced by the correlations of social sharing and linking/ranking behavior. In 2013, I expect to see many of the most successful marketers treat these practices not as disparate channels, but as optimizable elements of a whole.” - Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Overall, SEO will move further and further away from on-page SEO, and focus on the various components of off-page SEO, as Rand describes, that come together for a holistic and powerful SEO strategy.
Prediction: Context Is Content's New Best Friend
To do marketing better in 2013, marketers will need to go beyond simply creating content to creating a personalized experience for their target customer that’s seamless across multiple interactions. These experiences will leverage context to make a company’s marketing jive with
the searcher’s proclivities -- the things you’ve learned about your leads over months and years of talking with them. The things they do, the things they say, the sites they like, the products they purchase, their happiness level with your company -- all to have deeper and more meaningful relationships and better results.
Prediction: Marketers Will Know Thy Customer
Smarter marketing means understanding our customers beyond demographic information. In the future, we’ll be looking outside our CRM system to collect a unified view of customer behavior. According to David Raab, contributing analyst at Gleanster, web behavior data as well as data from other sources, such as accounting or order processing systems, will become easier to integrate in 2013. Over the next year, it will become an increasingly important initiative for CMOs to invest in technology that compiles customer data in a way that is more easily measurable and actionable. As a result, customer analysis will become the hot new feature for marketing automation providers.
“Marketing automation systems will provide more unified customer views across channels and systems. The goal of not merely importing data from multiple systems, but of integrating that data so interactions of the same individual are combined even when they take place in different channels will be increasingly realized. This is a critical capability since all analysis is based on this unified customer view.” - David Raab, Analyst, Gleanster
Prediction: Inbound, Not Automation, Becomes Priority
Just a few, short years ago, marketing automation was the must-have on every marketer's wish list. Unfortunately, the set-it and forget-it mentality of automation, while it may sound nice, resulted in an unhealthy process of churning a database of email contacts through a set “nurturing” process until they were spammed to death. The promise of marketing automation starts to fail because it is not supported by a solid inbound marketing foundation. Essentially, not enough leads enter the funnel to keep the automated machine running. This is called “Death by Marketing Automation.”
In 2013, CMOs and senior executives will allocate more resources to creating a strong inbound engine -- generating interest, traffic, leads, and conversions -- to support the demand generation engine. The graph below, provided by Google Trends, show that over time, more marketers will be searching for solutions and best practices to inbound marketing over marketing automation.
Prediction: Social & Content Influence SEO
Over the years, effective search engine optimization (SEO) was all about knowing the tricks of the trade. The SEO of tomorrow will be less about having the right H1 tag or the right keywords on the page and more about creating really high quality, original content that is socially consumed and shared.
“For the past decade and a half, marketers have often thought of SEO, social media, and content as separate channels and segmented practices. But these barriers are crumbling. In the past 24 months, we’ve seen the overlap between search, social, and content increase at a rapid pace, spurred on by innovations from the search engines, and reinforced by the correlations of social sharing and linking/ranking behavior. In 2013, I expect to see many of the most successful marketers treat these practices not as disparate channels, but as optimizable elements of a whole.” - Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Overall, SEO will move further and further away from on-page SEO, and focus on the various components of off-page SEO, as Rand describes, that come together for a holistic and powerful SEO strategy.
Prediction: Context Is Content's New Best Friend
To do marketing better in 2013, marketers will need to go beyond simply creating content to creating a personalized experience for their target customer that’s seamless across multiple interactions. These experiences will leverage context to make a company’s marketing jive with
the searcher’s proclivities -- the things you’ve learned about your leads over months and years of talking with them. The things they do, the things they say, the sites they like, the products they purchase, their happiness level with your company -- all to have deeper and more meaningful relationships and better results.
Prediction: Marketers Will Know Thy Customer
Smarter marketing means understanding our customers beyond demographic information. In the future, we’ll be looking outside our CRM system to collect a unified view of customer behavior. According to David Raab, contributing analyst at Gleanster, web behavior data as well as data from other sources, such as accounting or order processing systems, will become easier to integrate in 2013. Over the next year, it will become an increasingly important initiative for CMOs to invest in technology that compiles customer data in a way that is more easily measurable and actionable. As a result, customer analysis will become the hot new feature for marketing automation providers.
“Marketing automation systems will provide more unified customer views across channels and systems. The goal of not merely importing data from multiple systems, but of integrating that data so interactions of the same individual are combined even when they take place in different channels will be increasingly realized. This is a critical capability since all analysis is based on this unified customer view.” - David Raab, Analyst, Gleanster
Prediction: Inbound, Not Automation, Becomes Priority
Just a few, short years ago, marketing automation was the must-have on every marketer's wish list. Unfortunately, the set-it and forget-it mentality of automation, while it may sound nice, resulted in an unhealthy process of churning a database of email contacts through a set “nurturing” process until they were spammed to death. The promise of marketing automation starts to fail because it is not supported by a solid inbound marketing foundation. Essentially, not enough leads enter the funnel to keep the automated machine running. This is called “Death by Marketing Automation.”
In 2013, CMOs and senior executives will allocate more resources to creating a strong inbound engine -- generating interest, traffic, leads, and conversions -- to support the demand generation engine. The graph below, provided by Google Trends, show that over time, more marketers will be searching for solutions and best practices to inbound marketing over marketing automation.